Russia Pounds Kyiv With Missiles as Ukraine Sends Drones Toward Moscow Despite Peace Talk Push

A resident walks next to her house damaged during overnight Russian missile strikes, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, October 22, 2026. REUTERS.

A Kyiv missile attack by Russia and a Moscow drone attack by Ukraine struck overnight on Thursday, October 22, only hours after Moscow said it was ready to resume Ukraine peace talks next month.

Ukraine said Russia fired at least 21 ballistic missiles at Kyiv in three waves. President Volodymyr Zelensky said two people were killed and 34 injured, five of them children, in strikes on a dozen Ukrainian regions, and that many sites across the capital were damaged. Other reports, citing Ukrainian authorities, put the death toll at seven. Russia said it also hit port infrastructure in Ukraine’s Odesa region and vessels used by the Ukrainian military.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said 630 drones were launched toward the Moscow region overnight, and 163 of them headed for the capital. Most were shot down at long range. Two people were wounded near the city. Farther south, local officials in Lipetsk said some drones got through air defenses and hit apartment buildings and medical facilities. In the border region of Belgorod, Ukrainian drones killed one man and wounded another, officials there said.

The strikes followed two days of diplomacy. American envoy Steve Witkoff met Zelensky in Oslo on Tuesday, then flew to St. Petersburg to see Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, joined the Russian talks by video. Trump said afterward that it was “the closest we’ve been” to ending the war.

Yuri Ushakov, a Kremlin aide, said Russia is ready in principle to resume three-way peace talks in mid-November, after the American midterm elections, and wants them to focus on post-war security. Zelensky said he hopes they begin in early November. They would be the first since February.

Neither side sounds close to a deal. Witkoff described “some degree of momentum” after Oslo. Ushakov replied that the new ideas from the meeting did not fully satisfy Moscow. A senior Russian official briefed on the Putin meeting called it short and not substantive, and said Witkoff handed over a set of proposals drafted in Oslo.

According to a source close to the Kremlin, one proposal would have Ukraine cede all of the Donbas region to Russia in return for a security guarantee from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Russia says it launched the war partly to keep Ukraine out of the alliance. It has said it will not stop fighting unless Ukraine gives up more land, caps the size of its forces and is barred for good from joining alliances. Ukraine calls the invasion an unprovoked war of conquest and has long rejected those terms as a demand to surrender.

The meeting also stirred up trouble between Kyiv and Washington. In the room with Putin, Witkoff called him a “humanitarian” and said he saluted that. He thanked Putin for releasing Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American captured by Russian forces in Ukraine. Zelensky replied on X that Russian “humanitarians” had launched three waves of ballistic missiles at Kyiv since the previous evening.

Relations were already strained. Earlier this month, Trump announced a deal to buy Russian diesel and lifted sanctions on Moscow. Kyiv says Washington failed to share early warning of Russian missile launches, throttled the SpaceX satellite system that guides Ukrainian drones, and held back air defense systems that Europeans bought for Ukraine. Washington denies changing its policy to hamper Ukraine’s forces. Trump has repeatedly criticized Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil refineries and has called for Zelensky to be replaced.

The two countries also swapped war dead. Russia handed over 252 bodies, and Ukraine handed over 25, according to Belarus’s state news agency Belta. Exchanges like this have accompanied earlier steps toward negotiations.

Fighting has not slowed while the diplomacy moves along. Neither army has gained much ground, so both sides have leaned on long-range strikes this year. Russia keeps hitting the Ukrainian power grid, and Ukraine keeps hitting Russian oil refineries. Both have struck data centers, commercial warehouses, and Black Sea shipping. The war has run for more than four and a half years. Three short meetings in Istanbul last year and three rounds of American-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi and Geneva early this year produced no breakthrough.